


No Remedy

by susandwrites



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 29 January, Angst, Anniversaries, Anniversary, Drinking, Eventually some, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Hallucinations, John just doesn't see it, M/M, Minor Mary Morstan/John Watson, Sherlock has always loved John, Short & Sweet, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Year by year, a little bit of, new traditions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-10-21 08:16:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17639150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susandwrites/pseuds/susandwrites
Summary: 29 January 2010..."The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker Street."The anniversary of their first meeting through the years.





	1. Paper

**Author's Note:**

> "There is no remedy for love but to love more." -Henry David Thoreau

29 January 2011

 

_ There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before. _

 

John stared down at the little slip of paper in his fingers and felt his eyebrows furrow. He had… he had definitely thrown that away…. Hadn’t he?

 

It was the fortune from the cookie he’d had after dinner that night ‒ what? ‒ a year ago? Maybe more? Living with Sherlock was a lifetime each and every day. John had killed a man and Sherlock had treated him to Chinese. Seemed fair. Of course, it turned out that Sherlock treating John to anything was as rare an occasion as spotting a unicorn, so upon reflection, perhaps it  _ had  _ been fair.

 

They had found a little place between Brixton and Baker Street ‒ Sherlock had determined it to be good based on the fry-oil residue on the doorknob, but John strongly suspected he had simply been there before and was trying to impress him. It  _ had _ been good ‒ delicious, in fact, the best John had had in ages ‒ but that was beside the point. Dumplings, fried rice, egg rolls, broccoli swimming in that mysterious brown sauce ‒ John thought he might burst from eating so much, but Sherlock was the real champ. He ate easily twice as much as John had, his body clearly in desperate need after not having eaten for days. The bill came and Sherlock had snatched it up with surprising speed and tossed a cookie at John.

 

“You don’t have to do that,” John said, reaching for his wallet. But Sherlock slapped his credit card on the tablet and nearly clotheslined the waiter as he passed. 

 

“Just eat your cookie.” They each tore open their wrappings and cracked into the folded biscuits. Sherlock popped his into his mouth and unfolded the paper within. “‘A chance meeting opens new doors to success and friendship.’” He snorted and tossed the fortune onto his empty plate before taking a sip of his tea. “What utter tosh.”

 

_ Tosh! _ John laughed. What a posh twat. “I’m flattered, really.”

 

“Oh, please, John,” Sherlock waved his sarcastic reply away with a regal hand. “I am sure that our chance meeting will, indeed, lead to success, though friendship is no guarantee. But seeing as I received this bit of  _ ‘wisdom’ _ ‒ if you can call it that ‒  _ after _ our introduction, it can hardly be called a ‘fortune’. More like a ‘reflection’. What does yours say?”

 

“If it’s such  _ tosh _ , what does it matter?”

 

“It’s what ‘normal people’ do,” he replied smugly. John rolled his eyes and unfurled his own fortune.

 

“‘There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.’” He let out his own scoff at that.

 

“Well, that’s true enough,” Sherlock replied, accepting his card from the returned waiter and slipping it back into his wallet. “All human history is a constant, predicable loop.”

 

“I hardly think so,” John disagreed, taking up his own cup of tea. “I don’t think anyone has ever taken up a flatshare with a madman he’s just met and shot a serial murdering cabbie all in the same week.”

 

A grin pulled at Sherlock’s cheek, but he refused to meet John’s gaze. John dipped his fortune cookie in the last sip of his tea and ate the sweet, soft biscuit with a little hum of contentment. It really had been an excellent meal.

 

But John distinctly remembered dropping the fortune onto his plate along with his discarded napkin before they had left. So how could it be here? In 221B, propped up against the lucky cat on the mantle? Odd…

 

“John! Do hurry up or the florist will kill again before we get there!” Sherlock’s voice bellowed up the stairs and John snapped to, grabbing his wallet from where Sherlock had stashed it inside his skull. He tucked the fortune inside, slipped the wallet into his back pocket, and dashed out the door.


	2. Cotton

29 January 2012

 

The hat. That damned hat. 

 

John chewed at his lower lip and felt his sinuses filling embarrassingly with the threat of tears. When would he be done with all that? All the sobbing and insomnia and nightmares? Sherlock was  _ just _ a friend. 

 

Well, he  _ had _ been. Now he was nothing. Now he was dead. 

 

John wasn’t embarrassed about the crying. He’d done his fair share in his lifetime — more than his fair share. He’d lost people and killed people and nearly died himself and despite it all, despite all the gut-wrenching sobs and guilt and self-loathing that came with all that, he had made it home. He had made it home in one piece, something he was never sure he’d deserved, and somehow managed to carve out a mad existence that made him stop staring at his service revolver night after night. 

 

No, what embarrassed him was how, after years of death and destruction and pulling himself up by his bootstraps, John  _ felt _ like a grieving widow. Sherlock was not the first person he’d seen die — not even the first person he’d seen take his own life — but his death made John feel as though his lungs were pierced with tiny holes that would never allow him to take a full breath no matter how hard he tried. What  _ was _ that? 

 

How the hat had ended up in the closet by his front door, he would never know. For all John could guess, he might have dug it out from some unknown box after a bottle of whisky and hung it on the peg, expecting Sherlock to reappear and put the damned thing on. He did it often enough when John was pissed. John would be sitting in the chair by the window, head in one hand, glass in the other, and Sherlock would come bounding from the kitchen of John’s sterile new flat. He would always be talking at a mile a minute as he threw open the closet door, wrapped his coat around his long arms, and pulled the hat onto his curly head. “I’m Sherlock Holmes,” he would say facetiously, “I wear the damned hat.” Usually, then, John would devolve into a new round of sobs.

 

It wasn’t healthy. It was more than a  _ bit not good _ . He ought to pack the thing away again. He ought to be rid of all of the junk that he had brought from Baker Street. He ought to….

 

John replaced the hat on the peg and headed to the surgery.


	3. Leather

29 January 2013

 

This was not good.

 

How many other things had he bought? What sort of places had he been? What else had he done and with whom in the hours he couldn’t remember?

 

It was a  _ semi _ -practical purchase. He’d needed a new wallet. The old one was falling to shreds, but he’d had it since he entered the army. So he had kept it. He could be sentimental at times.

 

What he was  _ not _ was a big spender. And the Tom Ford bi-fold leather wallet sitting in the little Harrod’s gift box on his dresser likely cost more than he spent on groceries in a month. But he did not remember buying it. That was a problem.

 

A quick scan through his bank statements indicated that he had not  _ been _ to Harrod’s in months. And the last time, he remembered ‒ he’d gone in to buy a bottle of perfume for Molly’s birthday. He supposed he might have used cash, but what sort of madman roams around with a few hundred quid in their ancient, crumbling wallet? What sort of madman clearly gets so pissed that he spends a few hundred quid on a bloody  _ wallet _ and has it gift-wrapped? For himself!

 

He had not bought it with someone else in mind, that was for sure ‒ it had been tastefully embossed with the RAMC badge and his initials rested, almost dignified, in the bottom right corner. Honestly, it was not the sort of thing he would have ever bought for himself, at least not sober. It would be a good gift for him. But his birthday wasn’t for months. A Christmas gift he’d somehow missed?

 

There was no tag. No indication who had given it to him. For some reason, it reminded him of Sherlock. It was exactly the sort of unnecessarily posh thing he would have bought for himself. With a humourless laugh, John thought,  _ Or me, if he were to ever consider giving a gift _ . What a selfish arsehole. Just when John felt like he might be starting to forget, he’d remember.

 

_ “Oh, just take the wallet, John. You need a new one.” _

 

“I like my old one.”

 

_ “Sentimental foolishness.” _

 

“Did you get this for me?”

 

_ “Irrelevant.” _

 

“It  _ is _ relevant, Sherlock, it’s too expensive.”

 

_ “No. It isn’t. Not for a… ‘special’ occasion.” _

 

“What ‘special occasion’?” John turned, but the bedroom was empty. His face fell and he took a deep breath through his nose. Swallowing the sudden onslaught of emotion, John picked up his old wallet and started moving the contents into the luxe new one.


	4. Silk

29 January 2014

 

“Bloody Hell, why is this so difficult?” John tossed another tie onto his bed in frustration and stared down at the collection before him. He’d tried on all but two, and one of those had Christmas trees on it. It simply would not do for his engagement party.

 

“Because you have dreadfully pedestrian clothes, despite your secret desire to dress fashionably.” Sherlock did not even look up from his phone as he spoke and John let out a little  _ pfft _ as he took out the last decent tie on the rack. It was burgundy with little gold dots. “You’ve subconsciously disappointed your trendier id.”

 

“‘Secret desire’ my arse. I like my clothes perfectly fine, Sherlock. We’re not all as…  _ dandy _ as you.” He wrapped the strip of fabric around his neck and tried tying it, his growing frustration making the task all the more difficult.

 

“More’s the pity.” Sherlock was sitting in a small armchair beside the window of John and Mary’s bedroom, typing furiously on his phone, as had been his habit of late. “Not the burgundy ‒ it’s too dark for the grey of your suit.”

 

John ripped the tie from his neck in a huff. “I’m so glad you’ve come back from the dead so that you can critique my fashion choices again ‒ I’ve really missed having someone tear every outfit to pieces just before I step out the door, thanks.”

 

Sherlock was on his feet in an instant, his mobile tucked back into his jacket pocket, approaching the pile of discarded ties on John’s bed. He looked thinner than before ‒ harder. The lines and sharp angles of his face were more defined, and not just by age. He had told John a little of what had happened while he was away, but John strongly suspected it had been the Reader’s Digest version of events. Dismantling Moriarty’s network, traveling across Europe until he ended up in Serbia, getting up to God-only-knew what. John wished he knew. Wished he could take away a bit of the burden…

 

“This one.” Sherlock held out a navy blue tie with a pale green paisley pattern. John’s eyebrows flew up.

 

“Really?” He took it in hand. “I don’t even think this one is mine ‒ where did this come from?”

 

“Of course it’s yours, don’t be ridiculous.” Sherlock did that flippant hand gesture he always did whenever John was being “simple” and watched as John slipped it under the collar of his white dress shirt. 

 

“If you’re sure…” Turning to the mirror, John stretched his neck and commenced to tying the colourful strip of silk. “I’m pretty confident I’ve never seen this tie before. It feels more expensive than I would buy for myself.”

 

“That’s because you didn’t buy it for yourself. I did.” John turned to stare at Sherlock through the mirror and the knot in his hand fell through. “Oh for—” In a fit of annoyance, Sherlock stepped between John and the mirror and took the tie into his own hands. 

 

John was too distracted by Sherlock’s admission to be flustered by his closeness. “You bought me this tie?”

 

“Obviously.”

 

“It’s not obvious to me.”

 

“As you say, John, it’s too nice for you to have bought yourself. And Mary is perfectly content with the ties you already own and therefore wouldn’t purchase a new one for you. Who else would buy you such an item? Mrs. Hudson? Lestrade? Molly? Don’t be obtuse.” Sherlock completed his work on the tie in question and stepped away for John to admire the result. The knot was far more complicated than John would ever have managed and, of course, Sherlock was right. The colours and pattern were just bold enough to brighten the whole suit without being obnoxious. 

 

“Well, I must admit, it  _ does _ look rather dashing,” John conceded, making a small adjustment to his collar. 

 

“Of course it does.” Sherlock was back at his mobile. “And it brings out the blue of your eyes.”

 

Again, John turned to stare full-on at Sherlock. That was another thing that had changed since he’d come back. He was less reticent to compliment people. John especially — it seemed other people still annoyed him, but he had learned to reign in his exasperation quite a bit. But it always took John by surprise. 

 

“You’ve never bought me a gift. Not even for my birthday.” John was confused more than anything. He would say that Sherlock was behaving uncharacteristically if his character had not changed so much since the Fall. 

 

“Of course I have. And I hardly think your expulsion from the birth canal constitutes a special occasion. You didn’t even do anything.”

 

“A special occasion?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Like my engagement party?”

 

Sherlock’s thumbs paused in their rapid-fire movements over his mobile, but he very decidedly did not look at John. 

 

“Yes. Like your engagement party.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright... so year five is wood and I'm a bit stuck. The obvious answer is, well, you know, Sherlock's wood, but in keeping with the timeline (as well as I can), their fourth anniversary occurs between The Abominable Bride and The Six Thatchers. So for the purposes of this story, they aren't quite together yet.
> 
> I'd love some suggestions. What is a gift John would like and that Sherlock would think to give?


	5. Wood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So many thanks to Anyawen for their genius suggestion of wooden chopsticks and Bond movie nights. I doubt I would have been able to move forward with this little story for quite some time without Anyawen's help. All my love! <3 Diana

29 January 2015

“John? Where’s the tin opener?” Mary’s voice called from the kitchen and John leaned around the doorframe to what would become the nursery.

“It’s in the drawer under the kettle,” he called back before resuming the seemingly-impossible task of assembling a cot. All of the pieces were identical and yet, somehow, expected to fit together? _What sort of sadist…._

“Finish with that tomorrow,” Mary replied. “Can you come get the cooker? My hands are full.”

“Gladly.” John dropped the mysterious pieces of vinyl or wood or whatever they were in a pile on the floor and determined to have the damned thing put together tomorrow or not at all. Standing in the kitchen, Mary’s hands were indeed full as she was opening a few tins of vegetables for the dish on the range. John turned down the burner and stirred the rice in the pan before it burned. “What are we having?”

“It’s meant to be paella, but we’ll see when it’s done.” Mary offered him a self-deprecating grin and dumped the contents of the tins in her hands into the rice. She had never been an excellent cook, but John appreciated the effort nonetheless. At any rate, she was leaps and bounds better than he was. Overcome with affection, John stepped up behind her and placed a small kiss at the nape of her neck, his hand falling to her belly.

“I’m sure it’ll be wonderful,” he murmured against her skin. The smell of her perfume was so sweet and comforting. Mary gave an indulgent little huff and leaned into his embrace for a brief moment.

“You’re very kind. But I’ll keep the clinic on standby, just in case.” He smiled at that as she stepped out of his arms and opened a drawer to her right. It was filled with the oddments of a typical suburban kitchen ‒ soy sauce packets, measuring spoons, keys which belonged to unknown locks, unopened straws, and of course the tin opener. She dropped the utensil back in and dug around for something else as John tended to the cooker. “John? Are these yours?” There was a hint of laughter in her voice and John turned, intrigued.

“What is it?” She held up what appeared to be a pair of wooden chopsticks and he took them, his eyebrows furrowed.

They weren’t the cheap, peeling bamboo that came with a takeaway order. Instead, the bottom was made of a darker, sturdier wood ‒ cherry, maybe? And the wider tips were made of some sort of metal. Probably titanium. They were encased in a sleek leather sleeve and felt completely, unnecessarily, luxurious. The most notable feature, however, was that the metal handles had been engraved.

_Stiff-ass brit._

John laughed out loud.

 _Sherlock_ , he thought with a little shake of his head. Somehow, he just knew. Sherlock had slipped these into the drawer, as slick as a thief, on one of his visits. _Sentimental bastard. Chemical defect, indeed._

It was years ago, now. Three? Four years? John had lost count. After discovering that Sherlock had never, not once, in his entire life seen a James Bond film, John had taken it upon himself to rectify the situation. He’d always been partial to _Goldfinger_ , so that was where they started. _Goldfinger_ and an incredibly large order of Chinese takeaway. It had become a bit of a habit. Whenever things were slow and there were no cases to be had, John would sate Sherlock with another James Bond flick and Chinese and his strange, wonderful mind would be quieted for two blissful hours.

John smirked and replaced the chopsticks in their sleeve. “Yeah,” he said, “they’re mine.”

——

Sherlock opened the door rather faster than was necessary, actually causing John’s hair to flutter a bit in the breeze it created. “John?” _Surprise, relief, concern._ “Is Mary alright?”

“Wha‒ yeah, of course she is,” John answered. He held up the bag of takeaway in his hand and gestured into the flat behind Sherlock. “May I?” Stunned into silence ‒ for once ‒ Sherlock stepped back and allowed John entry. In his hand, Sherlock held a pair of tongs which gripped a slowly smoldering cricket ball. “Experiment?”

“Obviously.”

“No cases on, then?”

“Nope.” Sherlock popped the last ‘p’ in that way he did when he was trying to act “casual” or “normal”.

“Great.” Without invitation or further discussion, John dropped the food onto the coffee table and extracted a DVD from his jacket pocket. He popped open the case and set to work on the DVD player. “Put the kettle on, will you?”

Sherlock was motionless for a second, standing by the still-open door, staring at John as he moved about the flat. Finally, he seemed to reboot with a little jolt and scurried into the kitchen, dropping the tongs and cricket ball into the full sink with a clatter. By the time John had gotten the TV over to the correct input (Sherlock had gotten them mixed up when he electrocuted the telly a few years ago) and the DVD started, the kettle had boiled and Sherlock brought two steaming mugs into the sitting room.

With a relaxed groan, John leaned back on the sofa, container of lo mein in hand, and pressed play on _From Russia With Love_. He tucked in to his food with gusto and bit back a smirk as Sherlock slowly, almost tentatively, reached for a container of Kung Pao chicken ‒ his favourite. He was being so cautious, no doubt still confused by John’s abrupt appearance at 221B. Good. John liked when Sherlock was surprised, especially by him.

Making rather a show of it, John stretched out his arm and took his time selecting a dumpling from the plate in the center. Finally, Sherlock did a little double-take as John’s unnecessarily fancy chopsticks closed around one and transferred it to his mouth. At the sight of the utensils in John’s hand, Sherlock’s eyes widened fractionally and the slightest trace of a smile pulled at his lips. He said nothing, merely retrieved his food and visibly relaxed.

It couldn’t have been ten minutes in before Sherlock said around a mouthful of chicken and rice, “So that Irish fellow, he’s the villain?”

John snorted. “Could you not do that?”

“Do what?”

“Deduce the film. There’s supposed to be an element of surprise, you know.”

“You’ve already seen it, though.” John shrugged.

“So?”

“So there’s hardly any mystery.” Eyes still on the screen, Sherlock snorted. “There was hardly any mystery to begin with.” Despite himself, John smiled.

He’d missed this.


End file.
